Tan Viet Noodle House – Cabramatta – a popular non-pho Vietnamese noodle house with crispy chicken

Cabramatta in Sydney’s west is known for being a hot spot for tasty, affordable Vietnamese cuisine. Its restaurant cater to the generally working class population. Cabramatta has many parallel’s with Melbourne’s south-eastern suburb of Springvale thanks to its predominantly Vietnamese diaspora. Between Cabramatta and Springvale, I think Springvale fares better, because the the Labor State Government has been in power longer and has managed to transform the suburb in many positive ways with infrastructure and housing, while the Liberal/National State Governments have neglected Cabramatta with much needed infrastructure and quality of life improvements. You can read more about some of my favourite Springvale restaurants here and here.

Tan Viet is located on the main road. It can’t be missed if you walk down John Street. The restaurant interior looks relatively new and contemporary. It seems like it has been done-up quite recently.

If you come early enough in the dinner session, you won’t have to wait in line on a Friday evening. But the restaurant does get pretty popular around 6:30 pm to 7:00 pm. We came right before 6:30 pm and they seemed family and kid-friendly.

The service is pretty good. The servers have trolleys with various wrapped up utensils, plates, sauces and cups. They were excellent with providing us what we needed, and maybe a bit more than we needed.

The menu struck me. There is no pho on the menu at all. There is Bo Kho, spicy beef noodles with the tomato base, but the Vietnamese staple noodle soup is nowhere on this menu. But there are other Vietnamese dishes like broken rice and deep fried pork chop. It isn’t a huge menu. The prices of each dish were veering closer to $20 than $10.

While it’s a popular venue, I am not sure I’m sold on the flavours

We ordered two dishes that seemed popular, the first was their Crispy Chicken with Egg Noodle Soup for $18 and then their Deluxe Pork Chop Broken Rice for $17. The crispy chicken was crispy and well fried, but the noodle soup was rather bland and uninteresting. (I’d much rather the flavours at Hoa Tran in Springvale, which do this dish with much more love to the noodle soup with deep fried pork fat.) The broken rice was also uninteresting as I am normally quite fond of the dish. Even drenching the broken rice with the sweet fish sauce didn’t do the trick. I think they played it too safe and nothing really stood out as being very good.

We also had their three colour combination drink, which again was fine, but they played it safe again. While novel, the roasted peanuts didn’t add much to the drink’s flavour nor appeal.

We were recommended their restaurant from some local aunties and I’d say we probably had our views set pretty high. It’s a decent restaurant, but coming from Melbourne where the competition is higher and the stakes more important in Melbourne, this restaurant stood no chance.

I also felt that the restaurant catered a little towards Western sensibilities, which means cutting back on salt and sugar and other flavour enhancers, e.g. MSG.

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